ANDREW J. BACEVICH
Growing up in the Midwest during the 1950s and early 1960s, I came to understand the narrative of contemporary history and the narrative of the Cold War as one and the same. That the Cold War provided the organizing principle of the age was self-evident, even to a young boy. Catch the headlines on WGN, read the Chicago Tribune, flip through an occasional issue of Time or Life, and the rest was easy: the era’s great antagonisms—the United States vs. the Soviet Union, West vs. East, Free World vs. Communist bloc—told you pretty much everything you needed to know.
In this sense, if the Cold War was not without its anxious moments, it also served to impart order and clarity to American life. The anti-Communist crusade provided an authoritative template, equally useful for interpreting events abroad and developments at home. View the world through the Cold War prism, and discriminating between friend and foe, good and evil, important priorities and marginal ones became child’s play.
Further enhancing the Cold War’s standing was the disparity between what we knew about the way it began and what we were able to project about its likely course and conclusion. Whereas observers fixed the origins of the conflict with reassuring specificity, its scope and duration appeared ominously indefinite. We knew (or thought we knew) exactly when and how the Cold War had come about; we were clueless about when and how it was going to end.
As one consequence, the past became largely irrelevant. When World War II ended, history had (apparently) begun anew, thereby endowing the Cold War with an aura of remarkable singularity: Americans were living in a time the like of which humankind had never before encountered. Although events that had occurred prior to 1946 or 1947 might retain a certain quaint interest, few of them had much to say about the daunting challenges now facing the nation. Munich, Pearl Harbor, Yalta, and Hiroshima were the exceptions that proved the rule: events shorn of historical context and pressed into service as dark parables teaching universal truths.
As a second consequence, crisis became a permanent condition. In Cold War America, urgency, danger, and uncertainty permeated public discourse. Presidents competed with one another in proclaiming states of national emergency that seemingly never got revoked. All of this had a powerful disciplining effect. In 1917, an acerbic Randolph Bourne had observed that “In a time of faith, skepticism is the most intolerable of insults.”1 Americans in the decades after World War II embraced an especially compelling faith; for the great majority of citizens, skepticism became not simply intolerable but unimaginable.
The essence of that faith, to which all but a handful of marginalized contrarians devotedly adhered, was contained in twin convictions. According to the first, the United States was a nation under siege, beset by dire threats, its very survival at risk. According to the second, only the capacity and willingness to assert all of the instruments of hard power, instantly and without hesitation, could keep America’s enemies at bay.
These two notions describe the essence of the national security paradigm that has shaped U.S. policy for well over a half-century. From the late 1940s through the 1980s, responding to the threat posed by international communism meant placing a premium on maintaining, threatening, and at times using force. From this imperative there evolved the various components of the national security state: a large standing military establishment scattered around the world; a vast arsenal of strategic weapons kept ready for instant employment; intelligence agencies operating beyond public scrutiny in a “black world”—the entire conglomeration tended by an army of devoted bureaucrats planning, managing, budgeting, and elevating group-think to a fine art. To lend a veneer of rationality to the activities of this sprawling apparatus, successive administrations devised “doctrines” with imposing names. For Harry Truman there was Containment; for Dwight D. Eisenhower, Massive Retaliation; for John F. Kennedy, Flexible Response. With anxious citizens looking to the commander-in-chief to keep them safe, presidents accrued—and exercised—an ever-expanding array of prerogatives. In the process, the legislative branch by-and-large functioned as an enabler and drifted toward irrelevance.
With the Congress deferential if not altogether supine on matters related to national security, politics centered increasingly on the question of who controlled the Oval Office. More often than not, the key to winning the White House lay in scare-mongering, successful candidates from Eisenhower onward letting it be known that in a “dangerous world” electing their opponent was to invite the barbarians through the gates or risk the cataclysm of World War III.
Although the social and cultural upheaval associated with the 1960s, reinforced by the disaster of Vietnam, briefly opened up a window for skepticism, the overriding requirements of national security soon slammed that window shut. Americans today remember the Sixties as an era of profound and enduring change. When it came to national security policy, however, the impact proved to be ephemeral and insignificant.
Within a half-decade after the fall of Saigon, orthodoxy had reasserted itself: with the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, America was once again “standing tall.” In the context of domestic politics, the phrase “Jimmy Carter” took its place alongside “Munich” and “Yalta,” warning of the fate certain to befall any politician insufficiently alive to the imperative of basing U.S. policy on vigilance, assertiveness, and unassailable military superiority.
The Cold War did eventually end. As far as the cult of national security was concerned, this ostensibly monumental development hardly mattered: our security preoccupations survived the passing of the Soviet Union intact. The symbiotic relationship between the national security state and the imperial presidency endured into the 1990s. As the various alarms of that decade demonstrated, even after the collapse of communism—even when history itself had “ended”—the drumbeat of ongoing crisis continued.
The aura of insecurity that had enveloped Cold War America persisted—as did the habits, routines, and practices that had evolved over the previous half-century. In Panama and the Persian Gulf, in Somalia and Haiti, in the Balkans and the Taiwan Straits, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton acted in accordance with the dictates of the established national security paradigm. In doing so, and by no means incidentally, they sustained the freedom of presidential action that had evolved during the postwar era. If Truman could order U.S. forces into Korea, Eisenhower could overthrow the governments of Iran and Guatemala, and Kennedy could decide for or against nuclear war in October 1962, then surely there could be no objection to Clinton bombing Belgrade or Baghdad.
In this sense, George W. Bush’s response to 9/11 did not mark some radical departure from the past. Following in the footsteps of his predecessors, Bush merely exploited the process whereby the imperial presidency and our obsessions with national security feed on one another. The essence of the Bush Doctrine can be distilled into a single phrase: “more still”—more emphasis on accruing military power, more authority to the president to employ that power, more diligent efforts to impose American will on the world beyond our borders.
According to the Bush administration, the threat posed by Islamic radicalism obliged the United States to shed any lingering constraints (and scruples) pertaining to the use of force. In 2002, the president explicitly committed the United States to a doctrine of preventive war, a strategic concept uncomfortably reminiscent of Japan and Germany in the 1930s.2 Furthermore, consistent with real and manufactured emergencies of the previous sixty years, deciding when and where to employ armed force remained the president’s business and his alone. So at least President Bush and his loyal lieutenants have insisted, with neither the Congress nor the Democratic opposition nor the media mounting anything more than half-hearted objections.
The administration marketed this enterprise as the Global War on Terror, a conflict that it likened to the great struggles of the twentieth century. The label stuck. Seeing September 11 as a reprise of December 7, most Americans readily embraced the proposition that only by embarking upon a vast open-ended war could the United States avert an even greater disaster. That in conducting this war President Bush should claim the autonomy that Truman had enjoyed in dealing with Korea or JFK with Cuba was taken for granted.
By early 2006, however, according to statements by senior officials in the Bush administration and in the United States military, the global war on terror had morphed into what they now chose to call “the Long War.”3
Detached from place, excluding any reference to adversary or purpose, admitting no limits, the Long War reveals only a single aspect of the conflict it purports to describe: its temporal dimension, which is vast. Amorphous, malleable, infinitely expansible, and therefore easily adaptable to changing conditions or requirements that present themselves, the Long War confers on the national security elite unlimited drawing rights on American resources. It is the ultimate blank check.
Yet cast in somewhat different terms, this conception of a Long War is rich with analytical potential. Indeed, as a means to gain some fresh historical perspective on our current national security predicament, this evocative and suggestive phrase is ideal.
Seen from a historian’s point of view, America’s Long War did not begin with the attack on the World Trade Center. Instead, the conflict dates from World War II. Ever since that time, despite much talk of peace lying just around the corner, the people constituting what Bourne referred to as “the significant classes” have tacitly subscribed to the premise that genuine security is actually unobtainable and that even imperfect, tenuous security requires that the United States engage in perpetual struggle and accept the necessity of endless exertions.4
Far from inaugurating the Long War, the events of 9/11 merely marked the transition to that war’s latest phase. Indeed, on the far side of the immediate struggle against violent Islamic radicalism lie more threats and new challenges. Some of the those threats even now are becoming visible, with many in Washington already pointing to China as the inevitable next competitor with which the United States will be obliged to deal. With the Long War having already proven to be of far greater duration than most Americans recognize, it is not hyperbole to suggest that the conflict promises to go on forever.
The aim of this volume is to take stock of that Long War from various points of view and to argue that a fresh, comprehensive interpretation of America’s response to the insecurities that have plagued the nation since World War II is an urgent intellectual task. In conceiving this volume, it was never my intent that those participating in the project would conform to some preconceived interpretive line. Nor did I expect our collective efforts to yield a particular set of conclusions in which all might concur. As editor, I merely encouraged contributors to take a broad view, to take into account the latest findings of other scholars, and, if they were so inclined, to be willing to break some interpretive china. They have not disappointed me.
Each of the essays that follow stands on its own. Having said that, in my own judgment at least, the collection as a whole conveys certain larger insights that may have some bearing on the still-evolving Long War.
The first of these has to do with what we might call the enduring shadow of World War II. Out of the American experience of global war during the years 1941–1945 came habits, ambitions, and expectations that left a large and lasting imprint on virtually all subsequent matters related to national security. As more than a few of the essays in this collection suggest, World War II ought to be regarded as the Long War’s opening chapter rather than as its prehistory.
The second point offers a variation on the first. As several of the following essays make clear, if it makes no sense, in the context of national security policy, to draw a sharp line between World War II and the decades that follow, neither does it make any sense to perpetuate the conventional demarcation of those decades into discrete episodes: the Cold War from 1947 to 1989, the brief post–Cold War era from 1990 until September 2001, and the Global War on Terror, from 9/11 onward.
From our present-day perspective, this periodization obscures rather than clarifies. In fact, the so-called Cold War was by no means simply a face-off between East and West; during this period the preliminary rounds of the West’s renewed conflict with the Islamic world occurred. For today’s undergraduate, the key event of 1948 was not the Berlin Airlift; it was the creation of Israel. The big story of 1956 was not the Hungarian uprising but the crisis over Suez. U.S. support for the Afghan resistance in the 1980s matters less because it helped bring down the Soviet Union than because it produced the Taliban.
As for the so-called post–Cold War period, it was not some dreamy decade during which U.S. policymakers deluded themselves with visions of globalization and free trade. On the contrary, the 1990s saw the United States almost continuously jockeying for advantage in the Persian Gulf, the Horn of Africa, the Balkans, Central Asia, and elsewhere. More often than not, the jockeying entailed violence. Well before September 2001, that is, the locus of the Long War had shifted into Greater Middle East.
The third point relates to the manifest inadequacies of the American foreign policy elite and of the national security apparatus that is their handiwork. My own critical assessment of U.S. civil-military relations since World War II calls attention to a fact that Americans are loath to acknowledge: national security policy has long been the province of a small, self-perpetuating, self-anointed group of specialists. Members of this Power Elite, as C. Wright Mills trenchantly dubbed them a half-century ago, are dedicated to the proposition of excluding democratic influences from the making of national security policy. To the extent that members of the national security apparatus have taken public opinion into consideration, they have viewed it as something to manipulate, a charge as true in 1947 when Harry Truman set out to “scare hell” out of the American people about the Soviet menace as it was in 2002 when George W. Bush exaggerated the menace posed by Saddam Hussein. Viewing the average citizen as uninformed, fickle, and provincial, members of this elite imagine themselves to be sophisticated, sagacious, and coolly analytical.
Peppering the essays that follow is evidence calling these claims into question. Although U.S. policymakers have at times evinced prudence and foresight in matters related to national security, the Long War is filled with instances of incompetence, poor judgment, and a callow unwillingness to face the facts. Ignorance, prejudice, and something akin to irrational hysteria have informed decisions.
Time and again, members of the foreign policy elite have misperceived the world and misconstrued American interests, thereby exacerbating rather than alleviating threats. Time and again, they have misunderstood war and the consequences likely to flow from the use of force. The frequency with which senior U.S. officials have disregarded long-term goals in favor of what appears expedient in the short term calls into question the extent to which “strategy” as such actually figures in the making of policy.
Furthermore, the institutions created to assist this elite in managing the Long War have seldom lived up to their advance billing. All too frequently dysfunctional and almost always unaccountable, they have been more attuned to the pursuit of institutional goals and the preservation of bureaucratic privilege than to tending to the national interest. In his brilliant and underappreciated book The Fifty-Year Wound, Derek Leebaert tabulated the enormous costs that Americans paid to achieve victory in the Cold War—not only enormous but excessive because of the ineptitude and fecklessness of the national security bureaucracy.5 The essays collected here carry on with the process of tallying up those costs, material and moral, as they continue to accrue.
The fourth and final point emerges from the third. Because the formulation of national security policy has been undemocratic, public discourse related to those policies has been sterile, formulaic, and unproductive, more posturing than principled debate. The hegemonic status of the national security paradigm has served to squelch any consideration of real alternatives, despite the persistence and sporadic political influence of organized dissent. Habits and routines that became hard-wired during the decades after 1945, but whose relevance to a post-9/11 world has become highly questionable, remain off-limits for critical reexamination. These include the notion that the principal mission of the Department of Defense is not defense but “global power projection;” that the deployment of U.S. forces around the world provides a cost-effective way to maintain stability; and that exerting American power to export American values is good for “them” and good for us.
Whether or not Americans can devise something to take the place of the received wisdom on national security is a very large question indeed. Doing so implies a Great Debate, in Washington but especially among the public at large. Certainly, a precondition for such a debate is to see more clearly exactly how we got where we are today.
In 1917 when the perceived imperatives of national security found two million doughboys crossing the Atlantic to put an end to war while making the world safe for democracy, Randolph Bourne wrote that “There is work to be done to prevent this war of ours from passing into popular mythology as a holy crusade.”6 In our own day, there is similar work to be done: lest it become encrusted with myth and sow confusion as to our own true interests, we must begin seeing the Long War as it really is. We offer this volume in hopes of contributing to that cause.
Notes